


Reunion

by Leni



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, spoilers for 7x18
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-27 07:04:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14420088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leni/pseuds/Leni
Summary: Every version of Rumpelstiltskin eventually gets to the Temple of the Dead to mourn Belle.Every version of Facilier ambushes him there.Results, however, vary.





	1. Voices From The Other Side

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jackabelle73](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackabelle73/gifts).



> @jackabelle73 asked for wish!Rumple and wish!Belle + 'reunion'.
> 
> I'm sure this isn't what she had in mind. :)

 

Rumpelstiltskin glanced around the temple, wrinkling his nose at the flowery sweetness that permeated the air. It would be foul with death before long, he thought, muttering at himself as he toed the corpse next to him. It had been centuries since he had taken someone else’s power, and he needed a moment before he could stand upright again.

“Well, well,” he said, poking at the magic with his own. “Come and play, dearie!”

Thousands roared in response.

“Won’t do. Won’t do. Who were you, hm?” he asked the dead warlock, slamming his hands over his ears. The power he had swallowed rattled around in his head, a thousand little needles stab-stab-stabbing into his brain. Some manner of link into the beyond, a clamor of multitudes begging to be heard. “Hush,” he commanded out loud, and when they dared protest, he screamed. A moment of agony, and then he was wielding his dagger. “You wanted this?” he hissed. The voices quieted, terrified by the brunt of the Dark One’s power. The dead, so many, all aware and listening to him. “What a useful trick,” he said, tapping the edge of the dagger against the back of his hand. Just enough to keep him alert. Tap, tap, tap. The silence was welcome, as his newly obtained skill surrendered to him. “Useful, yes.” He tapped his temple in warning. “But don’t forget your place.”

He came to attention as he sensed an accusatory weight closing around him. For all the temple was brimming with memorials to the dead, it was meant as sanctuary for the living.

It blamed him for breaking the rules. As if he’d had a choice.

How original.

Rumpelstiltskin snorted. “He started it,” he snapped back.

He hadn’t meant to kill anybody.

Bristling, he resented the dead man with renewed fervor. This bit of peace he had found, this haven where his mourning passed unnoticed among the grief of many others… Here, he’d been challenged.

“He tried to kill me with a pincushion, Belle,” he told the little altar he’d arranged in her name, his voice an affronted whine. He had been puzzling over how to replace the marigolds with the roses Belle had favored in life, and whether he actually wanted to - these little flowers shone in golden hues in the candlelight, he did like that - when the warlock had interrupted him. “Impertinent idiot,” he spat. “Demands my dagger in exchange for his services, and pretends to force my hand. What was I to do?”

Too late, he realized that the woman who’d pled for the life of an swordswoman that had struck him, might have asked for mercy for this new assassin.

He snarled, lips curled into a scowl. “Nothing right.” He waved his dagger around, challenging his own stupidity and already aware that he would lose the encounter. He always did. “Never have my head in the right place,” he admitted, dropping his shoulders at the same time he vanished the dagger back to his vault. “I should have listened to you.”

At the sound of his own words, he started giggling.

“Ah, but I  _can_ now, can’t I?”

He bounced on his feet, good mood restored. A flick of his fingers took the corpse outside, and in deference to the lady he granted it a grave rather than the company of carrion birds. He approached the altar with renewed enthusiasm, gripping the edge with both hands.

“Sweetheart,” he dared, as he never had in her life. “Can you hear me?”

He had closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he sobbed at the sight of his chipped cup. He fumbled with the lock he’d imposed on the stream of voices, throwing it wide open, and sobbed again when she wasn’t on the other side.

“No. No, no, no!”

Disappointment became rage. He let the darkness surge and beat back the voices, tearing into them as it would through paper. The dead warlock’s magic hid formidable strength, but much as the seer’s visions, it had no interest in serving other than their original master. It would possess him and use him, much like his curse already did, but once it found no free hold on his soul, its obedience would be spare and reluctant at best.

Fading back into the background, though. That, it was willing to do.

At the last moment, however, he jolted at the brush of a familiar presence. “Bae,” he sighed, holding his breath, but wasn’t surprised when the boy ignored him, always disgusted by the monster in his father’s skin.

Rumpelstiltskin shrugged and let him go, unconcerned at the reopened wound. He deserved to hurt. Bae had told him so. He’d have arranged for his own son’s true love to be banished to another world. He’d have allowed the Evil Queen to cast her curse. There was a little baby who would have never existed, and Rumpelstiltskin had sworn never to go near that boy in exchange of learning his name. “I kept my promise,” he whispered. “You were right, my boy. Those bars didn’t hold me forever. But I kept my promise!”

He didn’t dare peek through the link, afraid that Baelfire would hate him anyway.

His son, he would leave to rest in peace. Bae had died protecting his home, a hero’s death. He had known that he was loved, and he had left his family in the safe hands of Queen Snow White.

There was no unfinished business to haunt Bae in the beyond, and disturbing his peace would be selfish. Rumpelstiltskin might feel his insides twist in protest, but he could be selfless just this once.

Reaching Belle, however, was non negotiable.

There had been no honor for her, no comfort in her last moments. She had died alone. In the darkness. Weak and hopeless. His bright girl, her unending thirst for knowledge and all her strength; reduced to the contents of a little leather pouch.

It was not to be born.

“I’m here, my love,” he whispered, feeding a tickle of power into the words, and unsurprised when there was no response. If Belle dwelled on the other side of this altar, she would come to him, even if only to rail at his stupidity. He bent to kiss the cup, though he now understood it was an illusion, shaped by his grief and his need for Belle, while the original was still shattered on the floor of his great hall. “And wherever you are,” he promised, feeling the void that was his curse, now enhanced with new darkness, and grasping onto sanity for Belle’s sake, “I’ll find you.”

He’d hoped to find her here, where the dead truly rested in peace. But if Belle, stubborn Belle, had not let go of her regrets to the end… There was still another option.

Visiting the Underworld would be no easy feat, but he wouldn’t fail her.

Never again.

 

cont.

24/04/18


	2. A Riddle Solved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A thousand thanks to @thatvermilionflycatcher, @nropay, @dekujin, @jackabelle73, and @mariequitecontrarie. I don’t think I’d have finished this chapter this soon without your support. You’re the best!

Rumpelstiltskin spun under the sunlight, leaving the gold to pool on the wild grass. Baskets of straw, an infinity of them, and he spun and spun again.

That Belle was dead was a wound reopened, but he’d lived through the agony before, hateful lie that it had been. It was the knowledge that she wasn’t at peace that made him rage and plot.

Belle deserved true rest, not to be held back in the Underworld by unfinished business. He knew the bitterness of it, after having lost Bae, and his teeth gnashed together at the thought of Belle going through something even remotely similar.

Bae was in a good place now, beyond the worries of his undeserving father. His one glimpse of the other side had assured him of that. But Belle…

Her, he could still help.

(He had kept his sanity by taking on an impossible mission, once. It was a tattered thing now, bitten through by decades of rats and roaches and little company but his curse, but it hanged on, teased awake by the possibility of doing right by Belle. He could do this. Yes, he would!)

The wheel helped him focus, his one constant across the centuries.

As the wheel turned, hour after hour, day after day, he grumbled and whispered at himself in careful soul-searching.

There was the obvious way to reach Belle, of course. Part of him appreciated the symmetry of luring a fool into damning his own soul. But, but, but! His curse was all he had. Wandering into the Underworld without its protection was as palatable as dispensing with it in the world without magic. Wouldn’t do. Weak again, pathetic worm again. Why would Belle respond to his call, when he didn’t deserve it?

No, no. Death was too easy. No dying for Rumpelstiltskin.

Then he needed someone who’d been dead. Plenty of those, ain’t it. Scores of corpses rotting all over the land. But ah! They must have returned to life as well.

Tricky business, that.

He stepped over to visit his old friend Viktor, carrying the mounds of gold he’d created since his break out. Fair payment for the drops of blood he needed. Yes, yes. He crossed between realms - and screamed when the laboratory turned up empty, spider webs and rusty equipment the only witnesses of the Dark One’s rage - or at least until a fireball turned all to ash.

A little questioning revealed the tragedy. The experiment had succeeded, and the doctor had been killed at his creation’s hands. The idiot.

Useless!

He racked his brains for another option, tugging at his hair and pacing the overgrown gardens outside the Dark Castle in increasing frustration. Dead was dead was dead, and if Viktor’s mad-born science tipped the odds once, its power was a stranger to him.

“There’s always a way,” he reminded himself, curling and uncurling his claws, never noticing the puncture wounds that opened and were immediately healed on his palm. He had no patience to chase rumors, to weed out the charlatans who claimed to have found a fountain of life from those who’d actually broken the rules of magic. Research was not an option. The walls of his workroom closed in on him, if he spent more than a few minutes trying to reacquaint himself with the old bookshelves.

He had thrown all the windows and doors open, and he still felt a shiver down the back of his neck unless he was in the open air.

He was useless. Except he couldn’t be. Not this time. Not again.

Think!

The spinning wheel worked under his fingers in a frenetic whirl - the perfect mirror of his thoughts. He needed someone alive, but they must have been dead too. Impossible! Then he needed someone dead, and to return them to life. He balked instinctively at that idea, too familiar with the arrogance of magic and its certainty that it was owed a price, to believe he’d be allowed a triumph after flaunting its rule.

What then?

Someone who was dead… and alive?

His mind grasped onto that idea, squeezing tight. Then he giggled and clapped as he realized he was on the right track. Careful, careful; he wove his thoughts as carefully as he would the finest thread. The archer, of course! The archer was dead in that other world. He’d spied on him and Regina enough to learn that. But the dead and the living were not the same. Different stories, different men!

However… If the same man could be divided in two…

Rumpelstiltskin jumped off the stool, leaving the wheel silent behind him. Yes, he’d solved this riddle before! The little doctor. The silly little doctor and his experiment. Rumpelstiltskin had abandoned that venture once, disgusted that the two men who emerged were too alike after all. But now… That was exactly what he needed.

Now, where had he left that two-faced wretch?

Ah. Yes.

The land of untold stories was a static haven for those who’d lost hope for the future. He’d made many an advantageous deal for showing the way to those on the brink of death. Then there were those he’d shoved there because they served no use in the outside world…

He kept to the shadows long enough to uncover the doctor’s little secret - and to make sure it would work.

“My good friend, Mr. Hyde,” he greeted, stepping into the man’s room, always careless about intruding in someone else’s personal space.

Hyde reared back in shock. Then his lips pulled back into a soundless snarl as he lunged at Rumpelstiltskin.

The shake of a finger, a disapproving click of his tongue, and magic froze Hyde in place. Wrathful eyes still followed him, promising murder. Rumpelstiltskin responded with the caricature of a placid grin. “Still blaming me for your blunders, I see,” he said, rounding about the other man. “Perhaps you’d prefer I have this conversation with your other half?”

Nobody resisted the lure of a deal with the Dark One.

“A potion?” Hyde roared, incensed at the proof that the pusillanimous doctor had made a fool of him. “Oh. I’ll drink it. And then I’ll twist his neck.”

Rumpelstiltskin snickered, thrilled when the pieces fell as he needed without direct intervention.

Two days later he took the leftover potion and left the bodies to rot. At his master’s orders, Poole had managed to sneak behind Jekyll, ending with twice the corpses as expected.

Vexed at the complication, Rumpelstiltskin was forced to conclude that the two halves had not been separated enough.

“Pity, pity, what a pity.” He twirled his dagger between thumb and forefinger. So there was a last connection between twined entities. Good thing that severing connections was what dark magic did best. “One little stab,” he murmured, already eager for the next stage. “That’s all it takes.”

Hyde’s failure had provided him with the perfect excuse to pick a new quarry. And this one, oh yes, oh yes! It would be so simple to convince her of the advantage of a clean cut between her halves.

“She owes me,” he told Belle, though he knew that the girl couldn’t hear him. “More importantly,” he insisted, throwing his hand into the air to punctuate his point, much as if Belle was really on the garden path beside him, “Regina owes you.”

The justification made him feel better. Belle wouldn’t approve of his plan, the sweet girl, but she would understand. She had been so soft, always forgiveness, always kindness. And yet… and yet… He hadn’t imagined the strength of her. She would see the justice. “Yes, exactly. You’re owed this and more,” he hissed, convinced, “and I swear to you, I—  _she_  will pay.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is good! Feedback is great! 
> 
> FEEDBACK IS LOVE!

**Author's Note:**

> If it's before the year 2100, I do want to hear your thoughts on this! FEED ME.


End file.
